SimpleMarkup #5 – Erotic Humor

Welcome back for another week of SimpleMarkup. I got so much praise for how funny last week’s strip was on the invisible said that I started feeling pressure to keep stepping up my comedy game, but it’s hard being progressively funny, so this week I went for something that only very specific editors who have had a very specific experience will find amusing. I’ve gotta manage expectations here, people!

I honestly don’t know how comic strip writers do it every week for years. Props to them. 🙂 Hopefully my fellow fiction editors and my own experiences will continue to inspire me.

For those who haven’t used the editing software PerfectIt before, the program is very, shall we say, virtuous. Anytime you have the word “shit” in a manuscript, it will ask if you meant “shift.” With “cock” it asks if you meant “clock.” When you’re running a final check through a manuscript where people cuss or cock their heads, it can be amusing, but it’s nowhere near as hilarious as when you’re editing sex scenes.

I do want to note that although I’m poking a little fun here, I find PerfectIt to be a very valuable editing tool. Different editors use it different ways, but I run it after I complete an edit, and just like SpellCheck, it’s a very useful tool for catching inconsistencies and tiny things that the human brain can easily miss. For example, it might tell you that while you were pretty good about correcting usages to “backseat driver,” you missed one “back seat driver.” It always catches at least a few things for me.